


Five times Finn and Rey held hands (and one time they didn’t)

by Anonymous



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-24 22:13:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6168646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Finn and Rey held hands (and one time they didn’t)

**Author's Note:**

> For [the tfa-kink meme](http://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/1082.html?thread=1051450#cmt1051450).

Finn didn’t think about it at the time, or during the chase through the remains of the Destroyer, or, well—there was a lot else going on at the time, stuff that he needed to pay attention to or else he’d die, or else they’d both die, or else they’d all die. But it was on Takodana that it struck him how right it had felt, that first time he grabbed Rey’s hand, the first time she had grabbed his.

He had memories, vague and murky, of it, from back before, when he was with his family. Before he’d been seized by the First Order. There had been no hand-holding in the Stormtrooper program. There had been holding—holding back, holding still, holding captive—but that was hardly the same. He’d never wanted it. He’d never even thought to ask if he wanted it.

This, he wanted.

When he woke up in the sick bay and Rey was at his bedside, fingers entwined in his, it took Finn an embarrassingly long time to realize that he wasn’t still asleep and dreaming.

-

Finn wished General Organa was a little taller, because even with her standing in front of him he could see lots and lots and lots of Resistance fighters staring at him. Bowing his head down so she could slip the medal over it was barely a relief, because when he looked up again, there they all were again.

He knew they were the good guys now, that he was a good guy now, but it wasn’t really enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning, to stop his knees from feeling weak and his heart from beating fast and his brain from screaming, _Run_.

"I still can’t believe you waited to hold this until I was better," he managed to mumble to her.

She smiled. "Of course we did. We couldn’t have done it without you." The hug was brief and unexpected.

But, Finn thought as she proceeded to the pilots and their medals, if it hadn’t been for him deflecting, Han Solo would still be alive. Her husband would still be alive. He wondered if she’d thought of that.

Of course she had. He wondered if she’d thought of anything else.

Poe bowed his head extra low and extra close when it was his turn, until his nose was practically touching the General’s dress, and Finn almost thought he could hear Han laughing. He reached out his right hand, fumbling for Rey’s, and she got it, and squeezed tight.

-

It wasn’t him they’d been waiting on before they held Han Solo’s wake. But Rey brought Luke Skywalker back the day before Finn emerged from his coma, and an old friend of Han’s showed up with several small barrels of definitely legitimately purchased Corellian rum two days after that. Maz had taken her invitation as a cue to commandeer Resistance provisions and personnel and put them to work at several fire pits that light up the clearing. 

Finn and Rey didn’t exactly have a place of honor here—they were close enough to get some of the first glasses of rum, to have a good view of General Organa and Chewbacca and Luke Skywalker in the center of it all as the sun began to sink and Chewbacca raised his glass and rumbled something in Shyriiwook. 

"And the songs that remind us of the better times," Leia finished the toast in Basic and clinked her glass against the wookie’s. There was a murmur of repetition all around, and then they drank.

It was the rum that brought tears to Finn’s eyes. He coughed and wiped his face, and caught Rey watching him. "It’s the smoke," he told her valiantly. "There’s a lot of smoke out here."

"Yeah," she said. She slipped an arm around his back, and took his hand. "There are bottles. We could go to a less smoky place."

He froze. He’d asked Poe for so much advice and now all he could remember was how BB-8 had somehow managed to convey it was snickering at him.

"I mean, unless you—" She began to pull away from him.

"NO!" He grabbed her hand. "I’d. Uh. Like that?" He would, he really, really would, so much that it didn’t seem appropriate. But then he thought about Han Solo, and he didn’t think Han would be offended at all. He thought Han would be giving him a lopsided smile. Maybe a wink.

Luke Skywalker was watching them as they waded in to grab a bottle of amber-colored liquid, and Finn didn’t think he was thinking, _About time, kid._ He definitely wasn’t smiling or winking. Finn didn’t know what to make of Skywalker, really. He wasn’t as scary as Finn had been expecting. He was kind of short and old and he had a beard, which wasn’t something Finn had seen a lot of in the First Order. Except for the people he killed.

He really didn’t want to think about that.

Stupid smoke.

There was an empty bench at the edge of the clearing, near where the forest began. The flickers of the fires were behind them. They had to stop holding hands so Rey could open the bottle.

Finn thought it might have tasted worse than the rum, but Rey had no problem keeping it down. He thought Han would have been proud of her for that. "I miss him," he said.

"Me too. I wish he was here with us." Rey wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I mean, not _here_ -here. But just—"

"Not dead."

He winced as soon as he said it, but she took it in stride, and as soon as she put the bottle back down said, "Yeah."

He turned toward her, just as she was turning to him, and suddenly they were too close. He could smell the liquor on her breath and his, could see light glinting off the whites of her eyes. He moved forward a little, and she did too.

Their teeth clacked together. It was painful and the shock of it made them both rear back just enough to make their second try less awkward, but Finn was still not that sure what to do with his nose or her tongue.

He reached out and wrapped his hand around hers, as Rey leaned back in for number three. This, this he knew how to do.

-

Her knuckles were white as she sank down on him and she was breathing shallowly.

"Hey," Finn said, and ran a hand up from her knee. "You don’t have to—" He saw the flash of defiance and pride in her eyes. "—rush. You don’t have to rush."

"Okay," she said. "We won’t—rush."

She was trembling, and it wasn’t the good kind of trembling. Finn moved his hand a little more, rubbed his thumb not far from where they were joined, and she gasped.

It was the good kind of gasp.

Her hand fluttered down, stroked the back of his hand. "You’re better at this than I am," she said, wonderingly. 

Finn didn’t know what to say to this. The look on Poe’s face when he’d told him he didn’t need any sex tips had been much worse than the look on his face when he’d admitted to practicing kissing with his Stormtrooper helmet. He’d rather Rey think he was a natural at this, that he’d never done this before.

And, he thought, as their other hands tangled together in the sheets, in a way, he never had.

-

Instead of parrying, Ren motioned with his hand and the Force pushed Rey and her blade away. The lightsaber arced up into the air, and Rey stumbled backwards and fell as in the far too close distance the giant throne shattered and crumbled.

They ran. Finn wanted to catch Rey’s hand, but she’d called the lightsaber back to it and if he groped around hoping to hold her wrist he’d be lucky to only lose a few fingers. Still, it felt wrong, wronger than being on the same side as Kylo Ren again—

The avalanche of cracked stone hit them at about the same time as the dark, stifling cloud of dust did.

When Finn came to, Ren was looming over Rey. He scrambled for his blaster. He didn’t find it. Rey’s lightsaber lay buzzing on the floor, and at first glance, in that light, it looked like they’d made it to the very edge.

They hadn’t.

They were in a rough circle about five meters across, clear except for some pebbles. The rubble on either side wasn’t quite as tall as Finn, but it was nothing he would want to be caught under.

"Help me," commanded Ren.

Finn wasn’t moving slowly to prove he didn't have to follow Ren's orders anymore when he got to his feet. He was moving slowly because he didn’t trust the bastard, and also because everything hurt. He kept one eye on Ren while he bent to pick up Rey’s lightsaber because if she wasn’t holding it, she must have been hurt. Unconscious. "I can carry her," he began, and then Ren shifted aside and he saw—

Rey was not unconscious. Her face was screwed up in pain, and not because her legs were bent awkwardly beneath her. Not broken, just—uncomfortable, he thought, although a couple of the fingers on her left hand look broken where she was pressing it against the ground. But because her right arm went up, and up, and at the wrist it disappeared into the pile of stone.

Blood was seeping through the cracks.

"I can lift it," Ren was saying, "I can lift it, but you’ll have to slide her out—"

"Are you insane?" Finn shouted. Part of him marveled at how stupid a question it was, but the rest of him kept going. "If you— she’ll bleed out. She needs a tourniquet, why didn’t you apply a tourniquet instead of standing around like an—"

"No," said Rey. She was drenched with sweat, but her voice was almost calm, her eyes clear. "You’ll need to conserve your strength to clear a path out for us." Her gaze went to Ren’s lightsaber. "You know what you must do."

Ren jerked back as if shot. "I— I can lift it up, I can find a tourniquet—"

Finn thought back on the fight, on all their fights, and his stomach sank when he realized that Ren was never really trying to kill her. He had no idea what this meant—nothing good—but he knew what he needed to do.

He muttered, "Useless," at Ren anyway before he knelt in front of Rey. He placed her lightsaber, still humming, on the ground, and held her face in his hands. "Hey," he said. "I love you. It’s gonna be okay."

She smiled, turned her face into his palm, and kissed it.

"Give me one of your gloves," he told Ren, "so she doesn’t bite her tongue in two. And if you really give a shit, hold her other hand."

Rey bit down on the glove when it was offered, but turned her face from Ren, glancing back over her shoulder at Finn, her lightsaber, the trapped, mangled, crushed mass of flesh and blood and bone he was about to cut off.

Only he didn’t know if he could do it with her staring at him. He wished she would close her eyes. He wished she would look elsewhere, anywhere but at him.

Kylo Ren began to hum a melody—haltingly, like he barely remembered how it went—and Rey’s head snapped back around, and Finn brought the lightsaber down.

The leather barely muffled Rey’s scream.

-

She was awake when he went in to see her, which was good. He’d spent enough time at her bedside listening to her breathing, half-panicking over her wounds and the dark shadows under her eyes, and how thin and pale she seemed against the sheets, without the spark, the fire, he felt from her all the other times he’d been near her.

"Hey," he said, awkwardly, and took the chair by the bed. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit trodden on by a herd of banthas," she said. "Sorry. They took me off the painkillers a few hours ago."

"It’s okay," he said. "You sort of look like ten parsecs of bad transit."

She snorted, and went to push herself up on one hand. It was the one covered in a cast, so she hissed as she squirmed her way into a sitting position. "But," she said, "thanks for saving my life."

"Any time." He meant it. He’d always meant it. He’ll always mean it. "Kylo Ren was worse than useless, though. Speaking of—"

She turned her face away from him. "I think he’s my cousin." That left him gaping, but relieved. Poe had said something about how sometimes girls were attracted to men they thought they could fix, and Finn wasn’t sure there was anyone who cried out to be fixed more than Ren. "I don’t want to talk about it."

"Then we won’t," Finn promised.

She shook her head, stared straight ahead. He felt his stomach hollow out. There might be other things wrong, then, apart from Kylo Ren. She was gearing herself up for something and it wasn’t—

"What you said back there, in the caves." She bit her lip, met his eyes. "Me too." He had no idea what she was talking about. "I mean, not I love me, too, but— I love you—"

"Oh," he said, and reached out, unthinkingly, for her hand. She hadn’t had time for physical therapy yet, so her grip was crushing, and he was losing circulation, almost in danger of losing his own hand, if they kept this up for too long.

But he didn't mind. He never wanted to let go.


End file.
